


in the pit of my bed

by maplemood



Category: Hadestown - Mitchell
Genre: Complicated Relationships, F/M, Fights, Mythology References, Post-Canon, Reconciliation, Sexual Content
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-29
Updated: 2019-05-29
Packaged: 2020-03-26 18:04:55
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,033
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19011049
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/maplemood/pseuds/maplemood
Summary: It’s Persephone’s first winter down home since Orpheus and Eurydice, that whole sorry mess, and Hades talks like there ain’t a grime of guilt coating his words, thick and black as a seam of coal in the mines; like Persephone can’t spot that grime, like she ain’t been his wife and shared his bed since long before mortal kingdoms crumbled under the weight of immortal industry.





	in the pit of my bed

“That crack,” she says one night clear to the deep-frozen middle of winter, “it’s getting wider, Hades. Getting wider all the time.”

“The boy’s gone,” says her husband. It’s Persephone’s first winter down home since Orpheus and Eurydice, that whole sorry mess, and Hades talks like there ain’t a grime of guilt coating his words, thick and black as a seam of coal in the mines; like Persephone can’t spot that grime, like she ain’t been his wife and shared his bed since long before mortal kingdoms crumbled under the weight of immortal industry. “The rest don’t have his spirit,” Hades rumbles. “There won’t be another riot, not for a while.”

“A while.” Sounds so paltry, so willfully _dumb_ , on his lips especially. “A while ain’t forever.”

“No.”

“Stone won’t stand forever,” says Persephone. She feels the displeased heave of his bulk, the creaking of their mattress springs as Hades turns away from her. And she thinks, then, to blab a mouthful of claptrap she only half-believes about change being a good thing, about their ability to change. About spring and sunlight and fresh growth, about the new life Hades is denying himself, about the stars winking frost-spangled miles overhead and Lord only knows what-all else. Persephone thinks, and thinking better of it keeps her mouth shut; she’s in no mood for soothing, no more than he’s in the mood to be soothed.

“You’ve always wanted this.” Hades’ tone is the kind he thinks all impartial judgement when in fact it’s full of resentment. Frozen with it, and that resentment boils Persephone’s blood.  

“‘Course I want it,” she snaps. What does he have to be resentful for, really—enough, she knows, more than his fair share, but doesn’t she carry the same resentments, the petty hurts and jabs, the lonesomeness of those long summer nights, and ain’t Persephone been trying? Ain’t she bitten her tongue this time around when cousins asked how was the old man, laid back in the grave for good, when Uncle Zeus (not her pa, not her daddy, no matter that half of him thrums in her pulse, keeps her heart going) needled her about the factory profits? Ain’t Persephone been Hades’ wife for an age upon an age, and ain’t she finally trying to act the part? So why can’t he act the part of her husband? Why can’t he at least pretend? She rolls over to glare at the back of his white head. “What, I never made that perfectly clear?”

“Perfectly.” The dark of the underground collects around him, masses in their bed like a stormcloud.

“I hate this place,” Persephone says, childish-angry as she gets sometimes, as drove her, when they were younger, to stomp on her husband’s black-booted toes, smack her fist against his unmoving chest and get not a word for her trouble. “And I ain’t never lied to you about that. Not once.”

“Oh, no. You’re nothing if not honest.”

“Fuck you.” Real tight, real sharp. Into the dark.

Hades doesn’t answer. He snorts, heavy and furious like a bull or like one of the slavering dogs stationed at the wall, but he doesn’t answer. She wishes he would. Hell, sometimes Persephone wishes the two of them would fight like Uncle Zeus and Aunt Hera fight, just about coming to blows in their ugliest moments. That ain’t Hades, though. Deep inside himself the man’s got no instinct for true cruelty, only doubt and a brooding meanness bred from doubt. The sharper edges of cruelty are all hers. Persephone’s the one, often as not, to cheapen their talk with whatever spite she’s feeling in the moment.

 _You thought I’d be impressed with this?_ The golden chains, the neon city. _Lord, husband, but you got no sense at all._

His eyes after she said that. Persephone remembers how his eyes darkened, shuttered. How Hades gripped her hand hard enough to crunch the bones together and growled something about Persephone not being used to such a metropolis, she who walked barefoot down country roads and swilled bathtub gin half the year. She’d see it had its good side, Hades said. “In time,” Hades said, and Persephone stretched a grin wide over her teeth. “Long time,” she said, yanking her hand loose from his.  

That night she remembers they fucked like a pair of stray dogs, quick heaves and animal grunting, not looking at each other, not wanting to. The sounds Hades made grated on Persephone’s nerves, scoured under her skin and filled her gut up with seething shame, half for him and half for herself—shame that her husband could sound such a fool, he who figured himself king of this whole operation, lord of the underworld. Shame, too, that he could work the same sounds out of her, the moaning and panting, the breathless smack of skin-to-skin.

“What’s your angle?” she asked him afterwards, a grate in her throat, legs splayed over the edge of the mattress. Wasn’t awful late yet. She thought she’d sneak out later, when he was snoring or snuck off himself to the office, unlock the bar and take a sample of her new inventory. Quality control, mind. Then walk through, out the back door, and she’d press her cheek to the cracked wall and sniff for the cooling fresh air. The stars seasoning it, the moon full enough to drink. Persephone jiggled one foot restlessly. “I can’t tell what you want anymore,” she said.

“What do you mean?” he asked after a minute. Hades sounded tired, he sounded old.

“Don’t play at that. You know what I mean.”

Coyness doesn’t suit him. He doesn’t have enough of his brothers’ sleaze or his nephews’ youth to pull it off; when he got himself upright, grunting a bit, almost groaning, she saw the scars bitten into his shoulder and chest. Electric light slanting through the window turned them into deep troughs. Persephone thought about reaching up to stroke them. She was riled at him still, so she didn’t.

“What do you think I want?” Hades looked down at her scowling face on the pillow. His eyes were still shuttered, shadowed like a skull’s. They topped Persephone off like an already-overflowing glass, brimmed her full of a new kind of shame.

She sighed. Jiggled her foot harder. “Ain’t that simple anymore, is it?”

Hades shook his head. “It’s never been simple,” he said, reaching down, moving firm yet careful, not sure if she’d cut his touch short like she had so many times before. She didn’t. She let him trace his big, cold fingers down the length of her, skimming the pressure off at throat and belly, pressing in a little firmer just below her belly, waiting, asking.

She wanted to snap at him. It’d take more than that to get back in her good graces. Still. Persephone’s always been one to take what she can get, and what’d finished a couple minutes before hadn’t been more than passing satisfactory for either of them. “Easy,” she said. “Take it slow.”

He didn’t need reminding, not really; the jab was half-hearted, half-wasted. Hades didn’t much more than bristle at it, those big, cold fingers already setting to work, opening her up carefully, as carefully as if she were one of the busted engines he sometimes tinkered with—his idea of fun, that—greasy, battered pieces of machinery spread out beneath him. And Persephone, she found she didn’t want to give him the satisfaction of putting her back together, didn’t want to see the quiet pleasure softening his eyes or a smile brightening his half-vexed, hangdog face, but too bad, too late. Hades was methodical. Not much romance left in the old man, maybe, but there was something in his way, his determination to see the job through and see it well done, that drove thoughts of drink and stars clean out of Persephone’s head. “Miss it,” she bit off somewhere in the middle, whining, shaking, her fingers clawed in the bedclothes and her hips bucking in time to his rhythm. “Goddamn, I miss—”

Hades planted a kiss to the inside of her thigh. “I know, lover.” His breath a hum there, his stubble a rasp. “Lover, I know.” And it was enough, for a space of time, to convince Persephone he did, that her husband who’d built this glaring, furnace-hot kingdom up from the bones of a pitiful-small mining town knew she could never love the factories glowing inside razor-wired walls, could only love him, and miss him, him and the small town, the smaller gods they’d once been. “It’ll get better,” he told her. “We’ll get better.” In the sweat and heave and out-crying as she came, and for half a decade or so after, Persephone believed him.

Now, she ain’t sure. Truly she ain’t, but believing someone and loving them don’t always mix the way they should. Oil and water, more often than not. Leastways these days. Leastways with Hades and Persephone.

She takes a deep breath. She hisses it out in a sigh, curled in their bed, curled towards her husband for all she can’t stand him tonight. Stone won’t stand forever. He knows as much, told her as much. _Show them a crack and they’ll tear down the wall,_ he ain’t in the habit of saying these things just to be poetic. Hades knew what she was up to then as he knows what she’s up to now.

Her fingers’ve curled to fists. Persephone uncurls them carefully, smooths them over the coverlet. “Husband,” she says, praying it won’t be just another word soured between them.

He makes one of his half-grumbling sounds. First few years of their marriage she found those devilish-difficult to parse, not understanding there wasn’t any real message to them, just Hades filling up the silence when he was too uncertain to bother with words. You wouldn’t believe, from noises like that, that he’d sweet-talked anyone down to Hadestown, Persephone or all the sad-eyed mortals who came after.

Those sad-eyed mortals will get the better of him, of her, in the end. There’s no stopping it and no helping it, not so far as Persephone can see. The tale’s already written out, if not told in full, and knowing the longing of each face that presses to the crack in the wall, starved for a glimpse of the stars, a breath of fresh air—

They came so close. Came within a step.

—knowing how sick she’s gotten off her own longing, how sick Hades has gotten off his, Persephone reaches out, though at the moment she hardly wants to. She rests her hand on the wall of his back, on the tensed knot of his shoulder.

It tenses up further. Then relaxes, if only by a bit. “It’s been a long day,” Hades says, a little grudging, not so much. Not so much that he’ll shrug off her touch.

Not so much that she’ll snatch it away. “Long enough,” Persephone says, “long enough.” To see all you’ve worked for crumble by inches is no easy thing. To build it up again from the foundations is no easy thing. “Hades,” she says, softer, “I been waiting a time yet, and I can wait a time longer.” She squeezes his shoulder and feels solid muscle, flesh and warmth in all that darkness.

 _We’ll get better._ He held her in his arms while she gasped and whimpered like a little girl. Aftershocks still trembling in her thighs, Persephone hated him for bringing her so low, for the godawful electric pitting his scars and his godawful certainty that wouldn’t last, it couldn’t. She hated him, and she tried, they tried and tried. Tried and will try again; ain’t she is wife? Ain’t Hades been her husband for an age upon an age?

Muscles shift as he lifts his arm. Without a noise, without a word, Hades covers her hand with his own. Under the weight of those calloused fingers and hair-dusted knuckles, under the weight of all that doubt and doubting hope, none of it simple, now or then, Persephone tells him, “Been years since you saw the stars, husband. When all this is over, I’ll show you the stars.”

**Author's Note:**

> 1.) Title from "How Long?"
> 
> 2.) Hades' scars are a reference to his less than awesome childhood with Cronus


End file.
